Saturday, May 5, 2018

Shruti Swamy says that her story
“Night Garden-- about a woman who watches her dog stare down a cobra and drive
it away--told itself to her very simply and she wrote it down, noting that
every once in a while “a miracle happens, and a story is started and finished
in the space of an evening.” She says this has only truly happened to herr once,
adding “ it is the sweetest feeling I know.”

The discovery of a story to tell is partially that which grabs the
artist and makes him or her need to tell it; it is something thatinvolves him with the nature of its latent significance
that is compelling. Sherwood Anderson once said, “having, from a conversation
overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I was like a woman who
has just become impregnated.Something
was growing inside me.At night when I
lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the tale kicking against the walls of
my body."This involvement of the
teller with the tale, this need to give it life and form, says Anderson, grows
out of the materials of the tale and the teller's relation to them."It was the tale trying to take form
that kicked about inside the tale-teller at night when he wanted to
sleep."

Katherine Anne Porter once said her stories spring from a tiny seed and
that she always writes a story in one sitting, "one single burst of
energy."Sometimes the story is so
unified around this central impulse or tone it seems that the writer must have
written in one go.Critic T.W. Higginson
said of De Maupassant's stories that they seem to have been done in one
sitting, "so complete is the grasp, the single grasp, upon the
mind."And William Carlos Williams
has said that the short story consists of one "single flight of the
imagination, complete:up and
down."

Hemingway once said that he wrote "The Killers" and "Ten
Indians" in one day, and Franz Kafka supposedly wrote the
"Judgment" in one night. This is not to say that the story that the
author ultimately published and that we read is what was written in one
sitting—but rather that the story was completed in its wholeness in one burst
of dominating impulse, one single flight of the imagination or involvement.
This suggests something about the short story that does not hold true for the
novel—that the form springs from a writer involvement in the story that
corresponds in some ways to the lyrical impulse of the poet.

Elizabeth Bowen has said that the "first necessity for the short
story, at the set out, is necessariness.The story, that is to say, must spring from an impression or perception
pressing enough, acute enough, to have made the writer write... The story
should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric; it
should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure--of however disturbing,
painful or complex a kind.” Bowen also argued that the story should be as
composed, in the plastic sense, and as visual as a picture.

Shruti Swamy’s “Night Garden” is indeed a picture, but it is also a
story about a woman’s creation of that picture—her fascination by a form manifested in the world outside her
window that stands for something mysterious; the story charts her efforts to
understand the significance of that spatial form, which draws her in and makes
her part of the form she observes.

Although she first is drawn to the shape the dog makes, his tail taunt
and his head level with his spine, “so his body arrowed into a straight line,
nearly gleaming with a quality of attention,” the snake also catches her
attention, for there seems something “too perfect about her movements, which
were curving and graceful. Half in love with both, I thought, and it chilled
me.”As night falls, the two animals
look like “unearthly, gods who had taken the form of animals for cosmic
battle.”

The story ends with the dog winning the frozen battle with the cobra
and the woman carrying her exhausted pet into the house.

O. Henry Prize Story editor Laura Furman suggests that there is more at
stake for the narrator than her dog’s life, for in watching the silent
confrontation she’s “bearing witness as well to the failure of her marriage and
the question of how she will face the rest of her life.”However, I see nothing in the story to
suggest this personal backstory, except perhaps the narrator’s general
statement that “everyone’s marriage is unknowable from the outside.”

There is nothing personal about this story; it is the creation of a
form in space, a picture that means something, which only the
picture itself can embody.

1 comment:

Doctor Ramanathan told Vijji to stay inside the house, not to break the concentration between the snake and the dog: “If you break that concentration the snake will kill him, and it will also be very dangerous for you. . . . No one must come in until the snake has left. Tell your husband to stay out until the snake is gone.”

Vijji took the doctor’s advice and stayed inside. She also told her sister that she must stay away: "No! Dr. Ramanathan says no one can come in or out." But, she didn’t call her husband. As much as she loved the dog and didn’t want him killed, she must have been pretty certain that her husband was not coming home.

Also this:“I have seen a dead snake, split open on the side of the road. Its blood was red and the muscle looked like meat, swarmed with flies. People said it was a bad omen for me, a bride, to see it then. Imagine the wedding of the Orissa bride, who married the cobra that lived near the anthill, and was blessed by the village.”

Suddenly, for me, the snake was the husband threatening not only Vijji, but the only thing she had left, her dog.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."